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Home - News
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Pro-Life Politics
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Bill to restore prenatal care for some 800 mothers flounders
By Sean McCarthy
The immigration reform debate tends to neatly separate key players into two groups: legal United States citizens; and those who are not. However, a state bill that would provide prenatal care for pregnant women — regardless of citizenship — illustrates how the issue becomes far murkier when it involves children born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
Proponents hope immigration politics won’t trump child welfare, and that the bill will have new life.
Babies that do not receive prenatal care are three times more likely to have a low birth weight and five times more likely to die than babies who receive prenatal care, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Medicaid stopped supporting prenatal care for undocumented immigrants on March 1, leaving about 800 women without coverage, according to HHS. State Sen. Kathy Campbell proposed a bill in February to fund it through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which covers uninsured children, including those who are unborn. Sens. Colby Coash, Jeremy Nordquist, Abbie Cornett, Ken Haar, Gwen Howard and Bob Krist were cosponsors.
But Gov. Dave Heineman opposed the bill, framing it as an immigration issue. The staunchly pro-life governor from Fremont said undocumented immigrations should not get taxpayer-funded benefits. The bill effectively died when Campbell didn’t have the 30 votes needed to override the governor’s promised veto.
Campbell said the bill forced people to decide which issue was more important: child welfare or immigration.
“You looked at [the bill] as a children’s issue versus the issue of undocumented women,” she said.
Campbell is the executive vice president of CEDARS Home for Children foundation and sits on the board of trustees at Bryan LGH Medical Center. She worked with Nebraska Appleseed and health organizations such as Voices for Children on the bill.
She doesn’t yet plan to reintroduce it during the next legislative session in January, but may consider doing so depending on what she hears from health care providers. She is asking physicians, health care providers and others how the restrictions for undocumented immigrations affect them.
The debate on the bill came just two months before Fremont passed its ordinance that prohibited businesses from hiring and landlords from renting to undocumented citizens. Aside from some senators from districts near Fremont, Campbell said she didn’t believe the city’s ordinance played a major role in the bill’s failure to even reach a floor vote, because immigration wasn’t the hot-button political topic that it is today.
Voices for Children Executive Director Kathy Bigsby Moore disagrees. Though her organization lobbied for the bill’s passage, she believes public sentiment regarding immigration, especially in an election year, influenced senators who opposed the bill.
Still, some pregnant women who are undocumented immigrants can obtain prenatal services through a few federally qualified community health centers, such as OneWorld Community Center, 4920 S. 30th. Campbell said private physicians have also called her to offer prenatal care to undocumented citizens who are pregnant.
Moore said her organization sent more than 1,000 signatures urging Heineman to sign the bill. Moore cited studies showing every dollar spent on prenatal care results in $2.50 in taxpayer savings after the child is born because nutritional and diabetes-related complications could be alleviated in the early stages of pregnancy.
She said four major challenges need to be overcome before the bill could pass:
l Nebraskans need a better understanding about the value of immigrants to the state. The state's immigrant population contributed $154 million in property, sales, income and gasoline taxes in 2006, according to an estimate by the Office of Latino/Latin American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. |
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